at home: around the house

When I was five or six I saw an episode of the Twighlight Zone tv show in which a little girl somehow fell, without any warning, right through her ordinary-seeming bedroom wall and into the foggy and horribly scary fourth dimension! From that point forward I was very careful not to touch or lean against bedroom walls and of course would never, ever fall asleep too close to one.

From age 3 to about 6, when people said, "shut the door, you'll let a draft in," I thought drafts were huge, stealthy, pale-grey bats that must be kept outside at all costs.

My grandmother has a large chest of drawers for silver. It's made of heavy, ornately carved wood. The first time my dad saw it he called it a monstrosity because it was so ugly. Everyone in my family called that chest "the monstrosity", as in "Lauren, would you go get some napkins out of the monstrosity." All throughout my childhood I believed that large chests of drawers were called Monstrosities. I even argued with my teacher about it in third grade because she tried to tell me a monstrosity was something bad. I thought, "What's so bad about a chest of drawers?"

I used to believe that the outlets in the wall were really like "doggie doors" to ants because I figured those were the only things small enough to fit in there. I imagined this huge ant kingdom crawling around my house in the walls, I wanted to go there so badly so I put my finger in the outlet and quickly realized they carried electricity and not ants...ouch!

I used to think that one of the buttons on our remote made the TV blow up. One day, I decided to try it, and was really disappointed when nothing happened.

I used to think that houses were carved out of huge boulders with a chisel and hammer. I always wondered where they could find so many big boulders.

This belief was when I was quite young. Probably around four or five. Anyway, you know those "child proof" lids on the medicine bottles? Well, my parents left them on the counters sometimes to remind them to take them, and just for fun I would try to open them. However my mom would tell me that they were childproof. In my little young mind, I thought "Well, children have small hands. So...if the bottle thinks that I have BIG hands, it'll open because I'm not a child!" So I would STRETCH my fingers out as much as I could, and while still stretching them, try to open the bottle. But alas, just having big hands wasn't enough to fool the smart perscription bottles. *sigh*

after watching harry potter my brother told me that i too could go through walls (like they did to get to the other station) thanks to him i got a concussion

My parents always told me about "Not wasting electricity!" Well when outside, I came across the electric meter. I gave myself the idea that if the meter got to showing all 9s, we would be out of electricity forever, so that's why it was bad to waste it.

I used to think that when you moved, you SWITCHED houses with the person who moved out.

My sister told me that telephone poles got medals for being the best telephone poles. I believed her for years. Turns out, they were serial numbers.

My mom used to send me out with a little paintbrush and some special solution, and I would paint the outside of the house, to protect it from winter (we lived in a trailer). It was a very important job. Years later she admitted it was plain water.

Somehow I got it in my head that unborn babies lived in the walls of houses while they were waiting to be born. Sometimes I liked the idea and felt comforted by the babies. And other times I felt kinda freaked out by it.

When I was a little girl, I remember my daddy telling me when I went up into the attic to be very careful and only walk on the beams. He said if I stepped into the pink insulation (which underneath would be the ceiling/drywall in the room below), that I would fall and fall and fall for the rest of my life! I would never stop falling - like a bottomless pit! I still have a fear of that to this very day!

When I was 3 or 4 years old my family decided to move to a new house. As we were checking out someone else's house we were thinking of buying, I got really nervous. They obviously still had all their belongings in there, and I thought that all that stuff would become ours if we bought the house. When we got to their kids room, my parents said "This is going to be your room, Mark". I was scared because it was a girl's room and I thought I would have to have all that girlie stuff and wear girl's clothes.

I used to believe that if you were vaccuuming a patterend carpet, you couldn't leave the end of the hose in one place, otherwise it would suck the pattern off! I believed this up until I was about 21...